Here comes a candle to light you to bed, And here comes a chopper to chop off your head.

My great-great grandmother, Mary Ann Hawkins, was born on 24th September 1830, exactly one month to the date before her young parents were married at St Leonard’s Church in Shoreditch in London’s East End. The church, which was recently used for the filming of the award-winning BBC TV series, Rev, isthe one refered to in the children’s nursery rhyme, Orangesand Lemons, and I often wonder if William Hawkins and Catherine Fitzgibbins thought of this as they stood at the altar that day. Were they hopeful of a prosperous life together, or did they already have intimations that their future would be a constant struggle against poverty and destitution? Unsurprisingly, the teenage Catherine was unable to sign her own name, but she had at least one member of her family to witness her nuptials – her older brother, William Fitzgibbins, who was also born in Ireland. Could it be that the two of them had initially come to London together to search for work, like many young Irish at the time?

Shoreditch Church, c1839

In the autumn of 1830, the future husband of Catherine and William Hawkins’ newborn infant, Mary Ann, was already a father of three, with another child on the way. Married to Sarah (née Vaughan), a respectable two years younger than he was, James Skelton probably never imagined that twenty years hence he would end up starting a second family with a woman who was the same age as his daughters. I do, however, feel quite proud (for want of a better word) of the way James stayed with Mary Ann, helping her to ‘grow rich’ by offering her and their children – plus her son from another relationship – a steady home, and eventually going on to make everything legal between them shortly before his death from severe bronchitis in 1867, just after turning 68.

Of course, however biased I might be, I don’t believe for one minute that my great-great grandfather was a saint in matters of the heart (and loins). The late marriage and the different addresses for the birth of the children – plus the empty ‘father’ space on two of the children’s birth certificates, later proven to be James’ – does seem as if he was initially evading some of his responsibility. At the same time, I believe he was probably under enormous pressure, at least in the beginning, to hide the relationship from his four remaining children, in particular his son, James William, the social climber whose own children were educated at Eton and Oxford and later hobnobbed with minor aristocracy.

But what I respect above all about my great-great grandfather is the integrity the older and financially stable James showed in his relationship with his young mistress: he was fully aware of his commitment to her and their shared brood and honoured that, despite the opportunities he possibly had to walk away. Indeed, I often wonder, given her background, whether Mary Ann Hawkins could have actually been a local prostitute whom James visited on a regular basis, before the birth of their first child brought them into a closer relationship. It was not uncommon at that time for impoverished young women to set themselves up privately in this line of business, and some even went on to establish a home with a regular client, particularly if she became the mother of his children.

Another piece of information which may add weight to this argument is the fact that on the Skelton-Hawkins children’s birth certificates Mary Ann’s profession was usually described as a ‘needlewoman’ – a job that would have brought in meagre earnings. Around about the time she met James in 1850/51, it looked as if she was living in lodgings in the insalubrious Waterloo Road district with two other young ‘needlewomen’, which might indicate that they (also) worked together as prostitutes, taking clients to their shared rooms. On the other hand, Mary Ann may have simply been doing piece work at home for James or another local tailor, and was introduced to her future husband in this manner. There is, unfortunately, no way of discovering how they actually did meet, and if I had a time machine which could only be deployed once, that is probably the very occasion in which I’d chose to use it.

As the daughter of a mother who sewed (those homemade kilts spring to mind again), and whose own mother had been a professional dressmaker in the 1920s, I am well aware of the skill involved in needlework, particularly before the age of fancy sewing machines and other relatively modern inventions, such as the zipper. And yet my Scottish grandmother was never as proud of her profession as I thought she should have been, even having to give it up when she married, in case it would reflect badly on my grandfather’s ability to provide for her. When I was old enough to appreciate the beautiful and intricate work she could do (both by hand and treadle-wheel machine) I elevated her in my young mind to the level of a fashion designer. But as my mother explained, dressmaking was a relatively common apprenticeship for young woman at that time, and the skills that my grandmother possessed would once not have been seen as out of the ordinary.

When I was slightly older my mother also told me that the term ‘dressmaker’ was once sometimes regarded as a euphemism for a prostitute. At the time I was rather shocked – I could not see the connection between the two roles, and felt sad that my grandmother’s talents might be demeaned in some way by this, particularly as she was such a stickler for propriety. It was only once I learned about the dressmakers from previous generations – the Victorian seamstresses who worked long hours at home taking in routine sewing, for which they were paid a pittance – that I made the connection between the professions. The vast majority of the work which these needlewomen did was not specialist, and there was an increasing supply of other able bodies available should anyone complain about the pay or fall behind with orders. So it is little wonder that many younger women sought to find another way to boost their income, particularly if they also had a young child to feed.

But what was Mary Ann’s story, and how did she come to be in this position in the first place? It’s an interesting one, reflecting as it does the harsh realities of life in the mid-eighteenth century when food prices were extremely high in relation to incomes (social historians estimate around 60% of a family’s income would have been spent on food at this time), and an economic recession had led to high unemployment, giving rise to the description of the decade as ‘the hungry forties’. The repeal of the unpopular Corn Laws in 1846 helped to mitigate the situation slightly, but the truth was that most poor families relied on bread, butter and dripping and other off-cuts of meat for their sustenance, with many not even having the wherewithal to prepare hot food in their lodgings or in fact even the utensils needed for cooking and eating. In such a case, the only chance to obtain a decent meal would have been at the many street stalls or from itinerant sellers, offering everything from hot pies, baked potatoes and pease soup to jellied eels and sheep’s trotters. Anyone who has been following the recent BBC2 series The Victorian Slum can attest to how unappetising to modern tastes some of these latter items appear to be!

Baked Potato Seller c1850

Mary Ann’s Irish mother, Catherine Fitzgibbins, was fifteen when she married the twenty-year old labourer William Hawkins in 1830, having already given birth to their first child (Mary Ann) the previous month. Although the couple married in Shoreditch, they spent most of the time living in the dingy streets and courts around St Paul’s cathedral, their address changing as regularly as some of my other ‘struggling’ ancestors later in the century, most notably my great-grandfather, Arthur Skelton (Catherine and William Hawkins’ grandson).

The Hawkins ‘stamping ground’ in St Paul’s Conservation Area

Crane Court (off Fleet St) today, where the Hawkins lived in 1837

By 1850 Catherine and William had a family of six, most of whom were girls with names that would not sound out of place in the 21st century: Catherine, Sarah, Sophia, Emma. And in the middle of these sisters there was a boy, unsurprisingly named William. To me the name Mary Ann, while certainly not as timeless and elegant as that of her younger sisters, is one which sounds pleasant enough. However, my mother is of the opinion it was a rather common name in Victorian England (in both the literal and pejorative sense) and to her it always conjures up a street-wise, smart-talking ‘Cockney gel’ – the kind who was adept at using her charms and guile to escape the life of poverty into which she’d been born.

We know for a fact that the family were extremely poor because around the time that Mary Ann gave birth to her first son William (see Black Sheep and Blackfriars) her parents and younger sisters ended up as inmates of that most dreaded of Victorian institutions – the workhouse. Sadly, for most of the 1850s the Hawkins were in and out of the City of London Union workhouses. The only family members who escaped this fate were the three older children: Mary Ann, Catherine and William. While Mary Ann found her own escape from destitution, her sister followed another path – that of life ‘in service’. In the 1851 census, the seventeen-year-old Catherine was working as a domestic servant to an elderly widow and her unmarried daughter living in Fleur-de-lys court, off Fleet Street. Their brother, thirteen-year-old William Hawkins, may have been in lodgings in nearby Cock Lane with several other young men, and working as a ‘reading boy’ – someone who reads out proofs to a publisher. If this is ‘our William’ it would point to the fact that he had at least picked up the ability to read along the way, but as a male child living in the City of London he stood a better chance of receiving some sort of charitable education than his sisters, or those who lived outside of the mercantile centre.

As it turned out, William’s two younger sisters did gain an education of sorts: at the ‘Pauper School’ attached to City of London Union workhouse. I sometimes wonder if it was Mary Ann’s mother’s final pregnancy which precipitated the family’s decision to enter the workhouse, where the youngest daughter, Emma, was born in 1850. Those who are familiar with the history of this Victorian institution will know that this was a fate most people tried to avoid. Not only would families be separated – as happened to the Hawkins – even though they usually had to register together in order to gain entry, but the conditions were so grim that it was viewed by the majority of the population as a ‘last resort’. The workhouse was (as the instigators of the 1834 New Poor Law had planned) a deterrent for all but the destitute, forcing able-bodied inmates into hours of drudgery in return for the most basic of living conditions. Thus it is little wonder that many impoverished women would have regarded prostitution as the only alternative.

The City of London Union Workhouse at Bow c1849

The Bow Workhouse being repaired after a fire in 1935

When the pregnant Catherine Hawkins and her daughters were admitted to the Mile End Workhouse, William Hawkins (who had worked as a casual labourer and porter) was sent instead to the nearby Bow Workhouse. This had been erected in 1849 by the City of London Union – an amalgamation of 98 individual parishes, which had previously offered mostly outdoor relief (as many parishes were too small to have their own workhouse). Although the building looks rather palatial, the vast majority of union workhouses were much more architecturally severe and functional in style, replacing the old ad hoc arrangement, where individual parishes utilised anything from old farm buildings to empty country houses, as well as creating purpose-built structures.

The historian Norman Longmate describes this post-1834 building boom in his book The Workhouse (1974) thus: Any traveller riding down the dusty lanes of Southern England between 1835 and 1840, or rattling in the mail coach along the fine new turnpike roads, could not have failed to notice the vast new buildings which seemed to be springing up everywhere. In market towns they dwarfed the surrounding shops and cottages; in the depths of the countryside they stood gauntly in hitherto untilled fields or on desolate stretches of waste land. Usually they consisted of a bleak, two-storey block, built around a courtyard, with vegetable gardens lying behind it. At the front there was a narrow gate, guarded by a porter’s lodge, with a large bell hanging above it, and the premises were invariably surrounded by a high wall.

There was, however, one positive aspect of the controversial New Poor Law for the Hawkins family. And that was the fact that instead of the whole family being incarcerated in the workhouse – a place primarily designed for adults – the law gave provision for the children of workhouse inmates to be given a basic education and trained in the type of jobs that would make them employable. For girls this usually meant as domestic servants, while boys would be equipped with the skills for a life at sea, or learn trades such as tailoring and shoemaking, which would help them to obtain apprenticeships. The Norwood School of Industry at Westow Hill, which prior to the New Poor Law had been run privately as a pauper school for London children by Frederick George Aubin and his wife (for which they recieved 4 shillings and sixpence per child), was the place which was chosen to be one of the workhouse schools for the City of London Union. Not only did it have a relatively good reputation, but it was several miles away from the morally and physically polluting influences of the capital.

The school had been set up earlier in the century in order to ease the plight of the destitute children who had been ‘farmed out’ by the City parishes as infants to the cottage homes of some of the poor and old residents of the parish (who needed the financial relief this opportunity gave them). Such a system was obviously open to abuse, and entry to the school at seven would have improved many of the children’s situation, despite the fact that initially there were no recreational activities on offer and the inmates were mainly expected to carry out menial tasks, such as sorting bristles for brushes. In addition, when pupils eventually did leave the care of the school it was often only to end up in the hands of unscrupulous employers who wanted the premium they were granted for taking on such a child.

However, after the New Poor Law came into effect the school was inspected several time (there had been a large number of infant deaths from cholera earlier in the decade) before commissioners were satisfied that enough improvements in education and sanitation had been made to issue an annual grant to allow the school to expand its facilities and employ more teachers (selected in Scotland), alongside skilled handicraftsmen for the workshops. By 1840 conditions seemed to have improved, and a visitor in the summer of that year writing in the Chambers Edinburgh Journal remarked that: Mr Aubin being a benevolent man, willing to engraft any improvement in his system, the routine of the estate was revised and remodelled a few years ago; on the recommendation of Dr. Kay, Poor Law Commissioner for the London district. It now serves as a pattern for the organisation of workhouse schools throughout the country. The great object held in view is to fit the children to engage with alacrity and ease in any species of useful employment to which they may be put on leaving school.

By the time the Hawkins children arrived at the Norwood School in 1849, it had been under the jurisdiction of the Poor Law Commissioners for several years. In the Second Annual Report of the Poor Law Board in 1836, Aubin had already mentioned the problem that these peripatetic workhouse children could cause (previously most children had entered the institution at a young age and remained there several years). He described how these new inmates were now often older and more likely to cause ‘trouble’ at the school, particularly as they only stayed for as long as their parents were in the workhouse, often leaving the school only to re-enter several months later . Records show that this was exactly the pattern the Hawkins sisters followed throughout the 1850s, until in 1858/59 Catherine and her two younger daughters (Sarah having no doubt found work as a domestic servant by then) entered the Christchurch Workhouse in Mint St, Southwark. This was a place which the medical journel, the Lancet, would soon condemn for its appalling conditions, including disease-ridden wards and lack of sanitation, just one of many cases reported which helped to change the law to force workhouses to create separate infirmaries (many of which eventually became NHS hospitals in the 20th century).

Contemporary Poster criticising the New Poor Law c1834.

Around this time, the Norwood School moved to new premises in the countryside at Hanwell, while the original buildings were demolished and the land sold for development. The arrival of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham in 1851 had changed the nature of the neighbourhood and created a demand for suburban housing, which was soon to be followed by the railway. And it was to this area that my grandparents would move with their young family in the 1930s, my grandfather having spent part of his boyhood in the area during the period when his father, Arthur (Mary Ann’s son), was dragging his family all over south London in search of work and cheaper rents.

Arrival of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham in 1851

In a curious side note, it was at this very same Union School in Hanwell where Charlie Chaplin and his brother were educated in the 1890s while their mother was an inmate of the Newington workhouse. In his autobiography, Chaplin recalls that his mother went to the bother of extricating herself from the workhouse in order to retrieve her sons, and spend the day with them at Kennington Park (a place with a connection to my own family, see A Tale of Two Parks). At the end of this halcyon few hours, the family had to face the degrading process of admitting themselves to the workhouse all over again. This was not an uncommon event, as families attempted to meet up with each other, however briefly, or survive outside the workhouse for longer periods. But it could be extremely difficult for ex-workhouse inmates to re-establish themselves in the community, and before long the family would often have to be re-admitted – as was the case with the Hawkins.

However, in 1850, when Sarah and Sophia Hawkins, aged thirteen and five respectively, were at the Norwood School, a very special visitor came to visit the institution: namely the writer Charles Dickens. In an article in Household Words (the new weekly journal he edited) entitled London Pauper Children, Dickens describes the school buildings as being as dingy and ugly asasmall brewhouse. However, it is his in-depth description of the children and their education that forms the bulk of the article, and which is particularly fascinating to me in light of the fact that he may have briefly seen Sophia or Sarah in the course of his exploration of the school.

Dickens describes the pupils as follows: The children, on their first appearance at this Norwood School, are usually in the most lamentable plight. Ignorance and dirt, rags and vermin, laziness and ill health, diseased scalps, and skins tortured by itch, are there characteristics. They are the very dregs of the population of the largest city in the world – the human waifs and strays of the modern Babylon; the children of poverty, and misery, and crime; in very many cases labouring under physical defects, such as bad sight or hearing; almost always stunted in their growth, and bearing the stamp of ugliness and suffering on their features.

And if this was not bad enough, he goes on to say:Generally born in back alleys and dark courts, their playground has been the streets, where the wits of many have been prematurely sharpened at the expense of any morals they might have. With minds and bodies destitute of proper nutriment, they are caught, as it were, by the parish officers, like half-wild creatures, roaming poverty-stricken amidst the wealth of our greatest city; and half-starved in a land where the law says no one shall be destitute of food and shelter. When their lucky fate send them to Norwood, they are generally little personifications of genuine poverty – compounds, as someone says, of ignorance, gin, and sprats.

His article goes to great lengths to praise the Norwood institution – in particular the education of the boys, who not only had books and learnt proper trades, but also undertook military-style parades, and naval exercises on board a replica ship (made by a Greenwich pensioner). Unfortunately for us, he does not expend so many words on the girls’ education, except to say that they had less book-learning and were taught houshold occupations the rest of the time. Although he points out that the majority of the pupils’ parents were inmates of the workhouse, Dickens mentions that there were also a few foundlings at the school, giving us the examples of little Olive Jewry and Alfred City. In the 1851 census schedule (which lists Sophia and Emma Hawkins), the very same Olive Jewry (age 3) can be seen, as well as a boy called James Park – sad reminders of how desperate their poverty-stricken mothers must have been to have abandoned them in such a way.

It is not clear what befell the Hawkins children in later years, nor indeed exactly what happened to their parents, although all evidence to date seems to point to the fact that William and Catherine finally separated. Catherine Hawkins appeared to live out the last decades of her life working as a cook/housekeeper for a group of Irish clergymen; firstly at St Patrick’s RC Church in Soho Square, then following the missionary, Father Francis Cotter Beckley, to the new St Patrick’s Church in Wapping (built for the Irish dockers and their families). It was at this clergy house where she died, in 1894, at the magnificant age of 80. Perhaps later in life, like many of us, she felt the pull of her roots and wanted to embrace the religion she’d left behind when she married her English husband. Sadly, it would appear as if her older brother William – who had made a living as a coal whipper – had died decades earlier at the age of 36, leaving a wife and five children. At least his English-born family would not have suffered the ignomy of being repatriated to Ireland if they had attempted to seek parish relief after his death, a fate which befell many Irish nationals at the time.

If this is indeed our Catherine Hawkins (and there is no reason to assume otherwise), then she would surely have known the life trajectory of Mary Ann – the daughter who escaped the degredations of the workhouse, despite her difficult start in life. She would also most likely have known her Hawkins-Skelton grandchildren – and even their own children. It certainly would be fitting to think that she was able to share in her oldest daughter’s good fortune in marrying James Skelton: the man who helped Mary Ann ‘to grow rich’ by giving her the emotional and financial security to keep all her children safely together under one roof, a privilege which had been denied Catherine.

Thank you so much for this most interesting article. I would like to use it as material for my English Conversation course at the local adult education college here in Husum, Germany. I am engaged in my own family history research which has taken me from a small village in the north of Germany to the first Puritan settlers in Massachusetts and therefore also to Suffolk. Fascinating! I look forward to more of your stories. Best wishes Annemarie

Thanks Annemarie for your positive feedback. What a super idea to use the post as teaching material – I have also used family history in ESL teaching and as a creative writing exercise and find it to be a great stimulus.

Interesting comments about the occupation of dressmaker linking it to poverty and prostitution. Most Victorian girls had to learn plain sewing – was that setting them up for an occupation that had overtones of immorality ? Also there was the occupation (usually for married or widowed women) of “taking in washing” which was one step away from the workhouse. My mother saw it as shameful that her grandmother had to take in washing to make ends meet. How she got it clean would be a wonder in equally poor housing in the West Riding industrial towns. Which then leads to those Victorian dressmakers, who would have to have candles for light, and have some way of keeping the garments clean.

Thanks for your comment, Marion. The link between prostitution and needlewomen in the mid-19th century (although possibly exaggerated through contemporary novels) was pointed out by Henry Mayhew in 1851 in his social investigations into the poverty of the period (published in London Labour and the London Poor) However, there were also many ‘genteel’ women who had fallen on hard times and turned to taking in sewing. I think the problem was that it was often so badly paid that it was not possible to survive from the work alone. And I also think attitudes to prostitution were probably different then. I too have come across relatives who took in laundry, and thought the same as you about the impossibility of the task.